Server Error —

HP says Itanium, HP-UX not dead yet

While exec says x86, Linux are future, company insists Itanium is part of plan.

At last week's Red Hat Summit in Boston, Hewlett-Packard Vice President for Industry-Standard Servers and Software Scott Farrand was caught without PR minders by ServerWatch's Sean Michael Kerner, and may have slipped off message a bit. In a video interview, Farrand pronounced that HP was shifting its strategy for mission-critical systems away from the Itanium processor and the HP-UX operating system and toward x86-based servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), through a project to bring business-critical functionality to the Linux operating system called Project Dragon Hawk, itself a subset of HP's Project Odyssey.

Project Dragon Hawk is an effort to bring the high-availability features of HP-UX, such as ServiceGuard (which has already been ported to Linux) to RHEL and the Intel x86 platform with a combination of server firmware and software. Dragon Hawk servers will run RHEL 6 and provide the ability to partition processors into up to 32 isolated virtual machines—a technology pulled from HP-UX's Process Resource Manager. Farrand said that HP was positioning Dragon Hawk as its future mission-critical platform. "We certainly support (Itanium and HP-UX) and love all that, but going forward our strategy for mission-critical computing is shifting to an x86 world," Farrand told Kernel. "It's not by coincidence that folks have de-committed to Itanium, specifically Oracle."

Given that HP is still awaiting judgement in its case against Oracle, that statement may have made a few people in HP's Business Critical Systems unit choke on their morning coffee. And sources at HP say that Farrand drifted a bit off-course in his comments. The company's official line on Project Odyssey is that it is in parallel to and complementary to the company's investments in Itanium and HP-UX. A source at HP said Farrand left out a part of HP's Project Odyssey briefing notes to that effect: "Project Odyssey includes continued investment in our established mission-critical portfolio of Integrity, NonStop, HP-UX, OpenVMS as well as our investments in building future mission-critical x86 platforms. Delivering Serviceguard for Linux/x86 is a step toward achieving that mission-critical x86 portfolio."

Project Odyssey, however, is HP's clear road ahead with customers that haven't bought into HP-UX in the past. With no support for Itanium past Red Hat Enterprse Linux version 5, and with RHEL being increasingly central to HP's strategy for cloud computing (and, pending litigation, support for Oracle on HP servers), perhaps Farrand was just a little bit ahead of the company in his pronouncement.

Tip of the hat to Ars reader Caveira for his tip on the ServerWatch story.

Sean Gallagher
Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Emailsean.gallagher@arstechnica.com//Twitter@thepacketrat